Do you find the world a fascinating place? How many worlds are there out there? There are so many amazing things going on in the world, so many facts to learn and so many mysteries to solve. So join my Worlds of Fascination for a articles on everything from the profound to the trivial, the odd to the mysterious.

Saturday, 18 February 2012

On a dark and stormy night in 1488 a young woman lay in a
dark cave on the banks of the River Nidd in Knaresborough in North Yorkshire struggling
to give birth to her illegitimate daughter.
As the rain lashed down and the lightning crackled across the sky, Agnes
Sontheil laboured through the night until her baby was born. The young mother called her infant daughter
Ursula and the cave was to be their home for the next two years. Eventually, after the Abbott of Beverley
brought pressure to bear, the small child was removed from her mother and the
cave, and placed in the care of a respectable local family. When Ursula
Sontheil grew up she married a carpenter from the city of York called Tom
Shipton in 1512.

Ursula Shipton, or Mother Shipton as she became known as,
started a career of telling fortunes and creating prophetic poems. The local people, who were very wary and
superstitious, believed that she was a witch.
This belief was reinforced by her appearances, because by many accounts MotherShipton was disfigured and deformed, unable to walk without the aid of a stick
and with a large hooked nose on her terrifyingly ugly face. She was so taunted and bullied by her
neighbours that she began spending most of her time back in the cave where she
had been born, wandering in the local woods looking for the herbs and healing
plants that she used in her remedies and potions.

Mother Shipton lived during the reign of the Tudor King
Henry VIII, and she confirmed her reputation as an incredibly accurate
soothsayer when she made a prediction concerning Cardinal Wolsey, Henry’s
powerful Lord Chancellor and Archbishop of York. Cardinal Wolsey’s influence over Henry VIII
was on the wane when she made a prophecy that he would never get to see York in
his lifetime, even though he was the appointed Archbishop of that city. The mighty statesman was, not surprisingly,
unimpressed with this prediction, and moved swiftly to prove Mother Shipton
wrong. He sent three Lords from his
retinue to remonstrate with her and to get her to withdraw what she had said,
but she merely laughed in their faces.
Even when they threatened to have her burned at the stake as a witch
unless she kept her mouth shut, she did not back down and just repeated her
prediction that the great Cardinal would never set his eyes on the city of
York.

This intransigence so incensed Cardinal Wolsey that he
immediately set out to travel to York. He
reached a place called Cawood Tower, some ten miles south of the city, when his
travelling party was forced to stop for the night. Determined to get his first sight of the
city, the Cardinal made to climb the tower, but before he could do it he was
arrested by the King’s men on a charge of high treason. The accuracy of this prophecy struck fear
into the hearts of many, and she was now feared as well as reviled.

Mother Shipton reputedly lived until 1561, which would have
made her an elderly lady of 73 when she died. During her life she had spoken
her predictions, not written them, and it wasn’t until around 1641 that the
first book recording her prophecies was produced. This book was put together by a lady called
Joanne Waller who compiled it just before she died at the age of 94. She claimed that she had heard the
predictions directly from Mother Shipton herself, so she must have been talking
to the famous soothsayer in the last few years of her life.

Since this first publication of Mother Shipton’s prophecies,
there have been over fifty other editions of her sayings. With many of these predictions, it is very
questionable as to how many of them were ever uttered by Mother Shipton, or
were made up in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. One of the most famous was her supposed
prediction about the end of the world coming in 1881, but as we are still here
over a hundred years later this one, thankfully, did not come true. Various other dates were quoted in different
publications and in different countries, but probably none of them came from
the lips of Mother Shipton. Other famous
predictions were the Civil War in England, the coming of iron ships and Samuel
Pepys wrote in his famous diary that while they were surveying the damage
wrought by the Great Fire of London that he had overheard people talking about Mother
Shipton prophesying the fiery conflagration.

Of course the reality is that we do not even really know if
Mother Shipton was an historical figure or just a local legend. The cave where
she was born, and brewed her healing potions is now a major tourist attraction
in Knaresborough called Mother Shipton’s Caves.
The caves also feature a local curiosity called the Petrifying
Well. Since the Middle Ages people have
hung objects in the waters of the Petrifying Well and returned a couple of
months later to find that they have been turned to stone. In earlier times it would be dead animals and
birds and things like wigs that would be left in the well, but these days teddy
bears are hung in the water, and once they have petrified they are sold in the
Gift Shop. The Petrifying Well is fed
from the waters of the Petrifying Well Spring, which in turn is fed through an
aquifer from a natural underground lake.
As the water travels through the aquifer it dissolves a very high
concentration of minerals from the surrounding rocks, and it is this high mineral
concentration in the spring water that turns things into stone if they are left
immersed long enough. In past centuries
people would bring the sick and infirm to the Petrifying Well to drink the
waters and bathe so that they would be healed, but these days you cannot drink
the water as the high mineral content renders it not suitable. Another feature
of Mother Shipton’s Caves is the Wishing Well, where apparently many of the
wishes made have really come true.

So do you believe that some people can see into the future
and that the prophecies of Mother Shipton were true? If so, maybe you should
visit Mother Shipton’s Cave, make a wish at the Wishing Well and buy a teddy
that was turned to stone in the Petrifying Well.

Tuesday, 7 February 2012

In the UK there are several very common and familiar animal,
insect and plant species that are not actually native to our country. They are species that have been introduced into
our countryside in one way or another, and have often driven our native species
from their habitats by out-competing them for food, passing on disease and
taking over territory. Invasive species
can be very destructive to often fragile habitats, and can cost the economy
millions of pounds a year. In fact, you may well have one of these alien
animals in your garden right now, and you may have spent many happy hours
watching their antics and admiring their aerial acrobatics in the trees. This cute little invader is the grey
squirrel, and although they seem so ubiquitous they have only been scampering
around our gardens and woodlands for the last hundred years or so.

Our native squirrel species is the smaller red squirrel, and
before the last quarter of the 19th century they numbered in the
millions and ranged across the whole country. Red squirrels are easily
recognisable by their striking red coats, bushy tails and tufts of red fur on
their ears. Their preferred habitat is conifer forest, where they live off pine
cones, seeds, shoots and fruit. The red
squirrel tends to be a solitary animal except during the mating season, when they
build large nests called dreys in the forks of trees producing a litter of between
2-3 kittens in the spring. However, it
is now estimated that there are as few as 120,000 red squirrels left in the
wild, and the major cause of their decline was the introduction of grey
squirrels into the UK.

The grey squirrel is a North American species, which arrived
in the UK between 1876 and 1929 when they were introduced into many parks and
private animal collections. Inevitably
some of the animals escaped or were released into the wild, where they thrived
and bred successfully. Because they were
so much bigger, stronger and ate a wider variety of food than the native reds,
they started to drive them out of their territory, so that now the red squirrel
is confined to parts of Scotland, northern England, Wales and the Isle of
Wight. The grey squirrels also passed on
disease to the reds, which they had no natural immunity to.

But although the grey squirrels have been the victorious conquerors
of our gardens and parks for decades now, they do have a new challenger that is
beginning to drive them out of their territory and ironically this new invasive
species is a member of their own family.
So don’t go and get your eyes tested if the squirrel running down your
fence looks black and not grey, as the black squirrel is slowly but surely
increasing its numbers in some parts of Britain.

Like its grey cousin, the black
squirrel also arrived from the US in the late 19th century,
where they were kept as exotic pets in a private zoo in Bedfordshire. Some of these animals escaped from captivity,
and in 1912 the first wild black squirrel was spotted in the environs of Letchworth,
Hertfordshire. It is now estimated that
there are more than 25,000 of them living in the UK, most of which are in the
East Anglia region, and some scientists think that they could eventually become
the dominant squirrel species in this country as there are more sightings of
black squirrels being reported from other parts of the UK.

Grey and black squirrels
are actually the same species, but a genetic mutation caused an excess of
melanin to be produced in some squirrels that caused the black pigmentation of
the fur. It is thought that having black
fur could help the squirrels to survive in colder climates, as it absorbs heat
more readily. Being so closely related,
the grey and black squirrels can breed with each other, but when they do the
black gene is dominant, which is another reason why they may eventually
overtake the grey squirrels in numbers.
There has been a major research project undertaken on the spread of
black squirrels by Anglia Ruskin University since 2004, where they have set up
a website asking the public to report any black squirrel sightings they have
made. So a seemingly successful invasive
species, can in its turn be overtaken by a more recently introduced species, so
that in a few years time we could all be watching black squirrels in our parks,
and the grey squirrels, just like the reds, might well have been pushed out and
be only surviving in small colonies in the remoter, more inhospitable parts of
the UK.

Search Worlds of Fascination

Google+ Badge

About Me

Writer, blogger and hypnotherapist.
Author of the Aten Sequence Books - science fantasy books for young adults set in Ancient Egypt. The first in the series, Pharaoh's Gold, is now available to download at Amazon